Ellen felt her whole body sag with relief.

“Thank you,” she said. “I can’t thank you enough, Mary-Kate.”

“No problem,” said Mary-Kate.

Ellen heard the deep rumble of a man’s voice in the background. “By the way, Alfred says to say hi.”

“Alfred?” said Ellen. “Alfred Boyle?”

Mary-Kate chuckled. Ellen didn’t think she’d ever heard her laugh before. “Don’t pretend to be so surprised, Ellen.”

Ellen laughed. A little nervously.

“Alfred said to tell you that he gave a speech to two hundred accountants today, and he had them in stitches. That’s really saying something. He made accountants laugh.”

“That’s great,” said Ellen.

“I’ll be in touch about where we go next with this,” said Mary-Kate. “But I expect once the journalist and editor know the full story, it will be shelved.”

“You’ll have to bill me for your work,” said Ellen. (Didn’t barristers charge by the minute?)

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Mary-Kate joyfully, and then she abruptly hung up.

Ellen dropped her head, closed her eyes and tapped the phone against her forehead. So her matchmaking with Mary-Kate and Alfred had paid off. She must remember to tell the journalist about it, if she ever got to speak to her again. Clinical hypnotherapist hypnotizes her patients to fall in love with each other. That would really add to her credibility.

“Everything OK?”

Ellen opened her eyes. Her mother was standing in front of her holding a salad bowl. “Thought I’d start clearing up. It’s getting a bit tense in there. I’m not surprised. This Saskia is clearly deranged.”

“Saskia is finished with us,” said Ellen. “I talked to her today.”

“Hypnotized her, did you?” said Anne smartly, but automatically, as if she was just doing it out of habit, and before Ellen could answer, she put the bowl down on the table and said, “Listen. I need to talk to you about something. About your father.”

“You’re getting married,” guessed Ellen.

She could just imagine the discreetly elegant wedding. Her mother would wear violet to match her eyes. There would be designer labels galore, flutes of champagne held between manicured fingers. It would be the sort of wedding that made it into the society pages. Ellen’s face would ache from faking her smile.

“Will you have Pip and Mel as bridesmaids?” she said. “I could be flower girl! Your daughter as your flower girl. Your cute little pregnant flower girl.”

“Ellen.”

“My stepbrothers could be page boys. Giant page boys.”

“We broke up.”

“Oh, no!” The one time Ellen was enjoying being a bitch and it was entirely inappropriate and hurtful. (And, in fact, she would have been perfectly happy for her parents to be married! Their wedding would have been moving and lovely. What was wrong with her?)

“What happened?” she asked. He went back to his wife, of course. Or he moved on to a younger model. Or was it somehow Ellen’s fault? Did he not like Ellen? (Ah, listen to the Inner Child piping up for attention.)

“I broke it off,” said Anne. She sat down at the kitchen table and extracted a cherry tomato from the salad bowl.

“But why?” Ellen pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her mother. “You seemed—well, you seemed completely besotted.”

“I know,” said her mother. She looked at Ellen and gave a little half smile and shrug. “I was. Look, I’m utterly mortified.”

Ellen was momentarily distracted by the sound of Patrick’s voice rising in the dining room. “Can we please talk about something else other than Saskia? Like, I don’t know, Armageddon? Who wants to talk about Armageddon?”

“You don’t need to feel embarrassed,” she said to her mother.

“I’ve been such a twit,” said Anne. “With everything you’ve got going on in your life at the moment.” She inclined her head toward the dining room. “Getting married, new stepson, baby on the way, deranged stalker and what have you—and I decide to throw your father into the mix!”

“Mum, I’m a grown-up,” said Ellen gravely, and extremely fraudulently, seeing as she’d thought exactly the same thing. “Tell me why you broke it off.”

“I’ve spent the last thirty-five years being in love with a memory,” said Anne. “It’s crazy, and I would have denied it, but every time I went out with anyone, I was comparing him to your father. Your father, whom I had never actually dated, whom I really didn’t even know that well. So of course, every man came up short.” She giggled. “In more ways than one.”

“Mother.” Ellen recoiled. “Please.”

“Sorry. So when David and I started dating again, I was deliriously happy. He was every bit as lovely as I recalled. Actually, let me make this clear. He is lovely. He still qualifies as the loveliest man I’ve ever met.”

“So? What’s the problem?” said Ellen.

“Well, I started noticing this feeling creeping over me after we’d spent more than an hour together. At first I couldn’t put a name to it, and then last week it hit me. I was bored.”

“Bored,” said Ellen. She was suddenly feeling very sorry for her father.

“Bored out of my mind,” confirmed Anne.